At the waters of Meribah

This is a mystery that could have shattered my life, that a Christian whom I loved unconditionally, would stop loving me, would quite deliberately shut the door on me, on my love, and lock it, and then go on rejoicing, as though I had never existed. The other mystery is that I still love that person, because the unconditional means that the door is unlocked on my side, but it does not mean that if ever the door opened from the other side, I would be willing to endure a beating. Anything might come through that door, and I am ready for that, but even a foul fiend can wear the face of piety, though not real righteousness, only the self-bestowed kind, and the Holy Spirit, no matter how persistently invoked, does not countenance the raising of arms that when not lifted in praise are poised to attack.

I don't have to dig deep in my past to unearth countless hurts and betrayals. They lie on the surface, buried only shallowly by the fallen leaves of my life's autumn years. My life has been prepared by love and trained to love, and that love has cut a wide swath through the field of my life, making room for welcoming many, and freely letting many go. Hurt and betrayal seem to me like dreams half-remembered upon waking in a morning of joy, dawn's sunlight washing them out by fresh-cast brilliance, illuminating the path ahead as if there were no past. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.’ Nothing could be truer, nothing more apt in a life that is willing to be laid down at any moment, again, for love, which is the beginning and end of all things.

Nothing seen seems the same anymore, nothing is as it once was, staid and stable and as still life as a painting. Everything is full of movement, of life, light, illumined by a love that does not, that cannot, grow cold, because having died once for all, voluntarily, it is now alive forever, and gives life to whomever, to whatever He chooses. Yes, not it, but He, proving that there is nobody and nothing here but Us, that everything temporal is only a shadow of everything eternal, leading us to follow, first with our eyes, then with our hearts, until the whole human being has followed the call of the Love that created all worlds, till dust is shown forth as spirit and appears as begotten before any world was made. ‘Hidden in the storm, I answered you, I tested you at the waters of Meribah, selah’
(Psalm 81).